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How AI splits startups into winners and losers | E2322

Release Date: 08/07/2026

Dr. Mark Hyman on Function Health & GLP-1 microdosing | E2334

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo - Northwest Registered Agent - Rippling - Today’s show: Your doctor almost certainly isn't testing your insulin. Dr. Mark Hyman sits down with Jason to explain the broken system that Function is fixing, and what 100 million biomarkers say about how sick America actually is. Learn why insulin beats blood sugar as an early warning for TKTKTK. Why might "normal" lab ranges be unreliable? PLUS, how does an expert like Dr. Hyman feel about GLP-1s and psychedelics? Guests: Dr. Mark Hyman on X: Function: Relevant Links: The Dr. Hyman Show...

Becki DeGraw on spinouts, IP licensing & clean exits | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Wilson Sonsini Today’s show: Spinouts are everywhere right now, and most founders get the cap table wrong. Jason sits down with Becki DeGraw, partner at Wilson Sonsini, to break down how to do it right, starting with his 80/20 rule for splitting the new cap table and why letting the old company keep too much of it kills your ability to raise. Becki also covers the legal side: who owns the IP, non-competes between the two companies, and the trap founders fall into when they're still on the old board. PLUS, the one question every Series A...

VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333

This Week in Startups

VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333 This Week In Startups is made possible by: partner 1 - link partner 2 - link partner 3 - link Today’s show: Are we one step closer to data centers in space? Katelin Holloway of Seven Seven Six and Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures break it down what it would take. Plus investor interest is surging in Physical AI companies. Paige explains why she backs applications of physical AI over general-purpose robotics, and how her thesis on multimodal AI led to the largest check she's ever written. We then dive into the...

Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent CLA Rippling Today’s show: Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it. Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes...

Breaking down Nvidia’s Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean Every.io PayPal Today’s show: *Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, just days after quietly licensing Poolside’s coding model for $6 billion+. On TWiST, Jason lays out why this is actually the biggest AI story of the year. Nvidia plans to offer enterprises unmetered, unlimited on-prem compute, pulling them away from reliance on Anthropic and OpenAI’s frontier models and products. PLUS we’re chatting with Halter founder & CEO Craig Piggott about how his company helps farmers optimize their land use via...

Bill Gates foresees massive AI job loss: these VCs disagree | E2330

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lightfield Northwest Registered Agent Rippling Today’s show: *Bill Gates dropped a 6,000 word warning: AI will be “the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst sort of injustice.” The Microsoft icon has an AI agenda for the US: new national institutions, AI use taxes, and jobs legally reserved for humans only. Our VC roundtable guests — Sheel Mohnot (Better Tomorrow Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical Venture Capital), and Hussein Kanji — push back hard. Is taxing profits a better fix for AI taking jobs than taxing the tokens...

You Can’t Fire a VC From Your Board: Here’s Why | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics

This Week in Startups

Today’s show: Can a founder actually fire a board member? Short answer: almost never. And the reason why may surprise a lot of founders. On this edition of Legal Basics, Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw joins Jason for a deep dive into who really controls your board, when investors start earning seats, and the differences between a board member and a board observer. Check out an episode that might just save your cab table someday. PLUS they walk through the full lifecycle of your startup’s board, exploring what it actually controls, when founders should start adding their own board...

China wants you to cheer for the robots taking your job | E2329

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo Quo Conservation Fund how old a movie has to be for me to be able to show a part of it on youtube Generally 10 seconds or less of a film clip can fall under fair use for commentary or criticism — which is how most podcasts and talk shows use clips without issue. But there's no hard legal rule based on age. What actually matters more than age is fair use, which considers: Purpose — commentary, criticism, education = stronger fair use case Amount used — shorter = safer; a 5-10 second clip for reaction/discussion is generally fine ...

Open source is going to win it all: Harvey proves it | E2328

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Superhuman Sentry Lightfield Today’s show: Jason’s been saying it for years now (and we’ve got an All In clip from 2023 to prove it). Open source will win the AI race. This week gives us a major evidence point, as $11B legal AI company Harvey released its own in-house model, trained on an open-weight Kimi K3 base. Harvey made a proprietary specialized solution without having to risk sharing its precious expert-compiled data with the major frontier labs. PLUS we’re checking out the FREE AI dictation app Willow with co-founder Allan Guo,...

Taste is the new programming language (w/ Astrocade CEO Amir Sadeghian) | AI Basics

This Week in Startups

The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google Cloud! Build context-aware AI workflows using DeepMind models and orchestration tools with Google for Startups’ new Startup technical guide on generative media. Get the guide here: Astrocade is building super-intelligence for the interactive world. Build the future of fun: Today’s show: *Making a video game once required a studio, an engine, and a team of five or more people working for six months. But with Astrocade, users just describe the game they’d like to play and share, and an AI assembles it from minutes, ready to publish to...

More Episodes

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

DigitalOcean
https://do.co/twist

Sentry
https://sentry.io/twist

Lightfield
https://lightfield.app

Today’s show:

A hedge fund just blew up shorting SaaS stocks. In turns out, the software companies that went all in on AI are bouncing back. Figma’s CEO — still riding high on strong revenue — forfeited roughly $46 million in stock awards to ease investor nerves. Twilio posted its strongest quarter in years. Airbnb’s CEO credits AI as the single biggest factor in the company’s incredible turnaround.

Jason and Lon break down what’s separating the winners this earnings season from the companies that are falling behind.

PLUS we’re chatting with Bluecore Energy CEO and founder Kofi Asante about his plan to power ports, and one day AI data centers, with small, floating nuclear reactors.

AND we’re kicking off the TWiST Weight Loss Challenge! Co-host Lon and Jason’s brother, Jamie, are both starting GLP-1s. We’ll track their progress and follow along as they attempt to collect $15,000 EACH in prize money.

Guest

Kofi Asante on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kofiasante1/

Bluecore Energy: https://www.bluecore.energy/

Jamie Calacanis on X: https://x.com/CalacanisJamie

Relevant Links

Bloomberg: Figma CEO forfeits $46M: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-05/figma-ceo-forfeits-46-million-in-stock-after-share-decline

Twilio announces second quarter 2026 results: https://investors.twilio.com/news-releases/news-release-details/twilio-announces-second-quarter-2026-results

TechCrunch: Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson buys The Onion: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/26/area-man-twilio-co-founder-jeff-lawson-buys-the-onion

Chesky: Airbnb will spend a lot more on AI: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/07/chesky-airbnb-ai-earnings.html

“Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Guidara on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Unreasonable-Hospitality-Remarkable-Giving-People/dp/0593418573

The Times: Meet the unreasonable hospitality master who inspired “The Bear”: https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-sunday-times-magazine/article/will-guidara-hospitality-the-bear-tkgzqz33w

Port of Long Beach partnership on nuclear-powered shipping: https://gcaptain.com/port-of-long-beach-marad-launch-first-u-s-partnership-on-nuclear-powered-shipping/

Reuters: ByteDance targets mega AI model: https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-targets-mega-ai-model-nearing-anthropics-mythos-ft-reports-2026-08-07/

Axios: OpenAI says its AI agents breached its own systems before Hugging Face: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/06/openai-hugging-face-black-hat

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House: https://franklloydwright.org/site/ennis-house/

Dwell: Why “The Studio” built a faux Frank Lloyd Wright HQ: https://www.dwell.com/article/the-studio-apple-tv-filming-locations-production-design-frank-lloyd-wright-john-lautner-97c68081

“Predators” documentary trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibVZkvpAJjI

A24 “Primetime” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fHXyqQOKL8

Alex Honnold free solos Taipei 101: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/25/sport/alex-honnold-taipei-101-free-solo-netflix-intl-hnk

Harmonic.ai: https://harmonic.ai/

Ro.co: http://ro.co/twist

Timestamps:

0:00 Figma, Twilio & Airbnb earnings: who's winning at AI?

9:50 DigitalOcean - Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.

11:32 The real cost of stock-based compensation

17:38 Kofi Asante of Blue Core Energy joins the show

19:47 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST

20:51 What is a small modular reactor (SMR)?

26:00 Floating nuclear reactors for ports and data centers

29:47 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you — it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app

31:56 Nuclear waste, submarine risks, and public perception

42:41 The generational shift in how we think about nuclear

48:19 ByteDance is training a 10 trillion parameter model

53:47 When AI models plan heists: the Hugging Face caper

58:02 Jason's Roko weight loss competition

1:11:38 Off duty: To Catch a Predator, Alex Honnold, and comedy

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